master plots (thing)

Beside each master plot I've tried to describe it where the title isn't good enough, and provide a popular or well-known example. By doing so I'm not trying to be reductionist but rather illustrative. If you can think of a better one than I've listed, or can suggest something for one I've left blank, let me know and I'll consider dropping it in.

Oh, and before your author's hackles go flying, be forewarned that I'm not going to try and name The One True Number. I don't think such a thing would be useful. I've listed them because it's fun reading, and really useful to kickstart one's own imagination. Writing with them as proscription would surely be the death of creativity.

37

36

George Polti proclaimed in his 1921 book The Thirty-Six Dramatic Situations that there were, as you'd imagine, exactly 36 dramatic situations, naming specific dynamic elements neccessary for each. He claimed to be trying to reconstruct the 36 plots that Goethe alleges someone named Carlo Gozzi devised, but it could be hearsay.

2

Tobias even admits that his 20 can be reduced to two, but he divides them differently.

Plots of the body, which are all action.

Plots of the mind, which have pith.

1

Joseph Campell in his 1949 book The Hero with a Thousand Faces said there was actually only one called The Hero's Journey (introducing the concept of the Deep Structure to the literati of the time), and unduly influencing Disney, via a famous memo to executives by Christopher Vogler, up until the present day.) The seminal example: Star Wars, which Lucas deliberately structured around The Hero's Journey.
But Campbell was talking about myth in particular and admitted that there were countless permutations. And really, each of those parts could be a basic plotline, couldn't it?

Much more succintly, Kurt Vonnegut (as recently as 2001, when he was accepting the New York State Author title) beat everyone in the reduction game and stated that there was just one, "man in a hole," essentially saying that all narrative was about conflict resultion in some form.

...

And then he added "boy meets girl," qualifying that it needen't really be about a boy.